[Druids Bidding 02.0] RenFaire Druids: Dunskey Castle Prequels

by Jane Stain

  Peadar was being so thoughtful.

  She knew she was favored not to be stuck here with some lunk who treated her poorly.

  The captain’s leers came to mind.

  She shook them off.

  No sense in dwelling on unpleasant things.

  Even so, Vange looked up into Peadar’s eyes to see if that would calm the mounting panic she felt.

  She had already changed cultures once, when her parents moved to America with her from the Phillippeans when she was 9. Emily’s fast friendship had helped a lot, but that move had been the hardest thing Vange had ever done.

  But moving to 1560 permanently?

  This made moving to America look easy.

  But Peadar’s look was kind. Loving. Compassionate.

  “I will wear it proudly,” she said to him with a simple smile.

  If he noticed how she trembled in his embrace, he didn’t mention it.

  As Vange strapped her belt on in preparation to go to the captain’s cabin for supper, she felt Emily’s email printout poke her through one of the many pouches which dangled from it.

  “Oh. I found this in my old bodice last night, Peadar. It’s a letter from Emily.”

  “Och, we scarcely have the time--”

  “When will we ever?”

  “Very well, but read it fast, you ken?”

  “Huh?”

  “We cannot keep the captain waiting.”

  Vange resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

  Just barely.

  This email was so much more important than what some stranger thought.

  With trembling fingers, she untied the drawstring, opened the pouch, and took out the crumpled paper, thanking Heaven that she’d found it before she’d had to ditch her English clothes.

  Peadar read it over her shoulder.

  ----To: Felix and Ana Andrade

  ----From: Emily MacGregor

  I don’t quite know how to tell you this, so I’ll just come right out and say it: Vange has traveled to Scotland, and she is stuck there. We may have a chance to get a message to her and help her come home if you print out this email and put it in her English renaissance faire costume.

  I can’t tell you how this will help.

  I am sworn to secrecy.

  Besides, you can’t interfere.

  Our chance to communicate with her may be lost if you interfere.

  So please print this out as soon as you read it and stow it in her costume. Then call her phone because I have it, and tell me it’s done, OK?

  Vange,

  I love you almost as much as I love Dall and my parents and Dall’s children. Please keep yourself safe.

  I live under a shadow now, as you are most likely aware. Most of the time, I myself am unaware of it, through means I dare not mention.

  But even when I wake up in the middle of the night fully conscious of what I’m missing, such as now, I cannot say or do much that goes unnoticed, and I cannot discuss the cause of it with anyone.

  So I hope you get the meaning of what I’m about to write. By necessity, it’s vague.

  Vange, they have my phone.

  It’s bugged, so they’ve known where it was all along.

  They’ve recovered it, and you won’t get it.

  But don’t panic.

  Even without a phone, they have the ability to get you home. Go to them. You can find one of their healers in any castle in Scotland, at least in the highlands. Maybe in the lowlands as well.

  Until you can get to a castle, stay with Peigi. She can still get into her grandmother’s old house, and Dall and I hid many useful things in trunks up in that attic.

  I’m sure Peigi has told you this by now, but I want to re-enforce it:

  Peadar had best not tell anyone he’s a MacGregor. In a few years, things will get really nasty for anyone who claims the MacGregor name.

  And whatever you do Vange, don’t go to Ireland. Everyone who might have helped you come home has been driven out of there.

  Eight hours into their voyage to Ireland, Vange and Peadar knocked on the door to the captain’s cabin.

  Knock knock knock.

  “Do come in and seat yourselves. There be wine on the table. Will you pour for us, Evangeline?”

  Feeling a pat on her back, Vange obliged.

  Instead of wine glasses, the captain had small pottery cups without handles, and they fit into holes in the table. It was a good thing too, because the ship kept bobbing on the waves.

  As she poured, Vange snuck glances at the fourth person at the table.

  She figured he must be Irish. He wore a leine shirt similar to hers and Peadar’s and the captain’s, but unlike the other two men, he didn’t wear a kilt over it. He still had plenty of clothing on by modern standards, but to someone used to seeing men in kilts, the 1560 Irishman looked like he was in his underwear.

  Once everyone had their wine, Vange sat down next to Peadar with hers and tried to understand what the three men said to each other in Gaelic.

  She wasn’t very successful.

  She caught a word here and there, but that was all.

  All four of them ate a good meal of stew and bannocks, on metal plates with metal spoons. Vange was asked to dish their food onto the plates from the serving dishes the cook brought in, and she did so graciously, for her.

  After the meal, the men continued to talk.

  The Irishman kept looking at Vange with curiosity.

  She felt her anger rising up at his stares. Most of the crew on this ship were Polynesian, so surely he had seen a woman like her before. There was no need to stare.

  But then she realized that the three men looked very similar in appearance to her, the two Scots and the Irishman. Perhaps she was the first Polynesian wife anyone they knew had taken?

  Seeing Peadar so raptly involved in conversation with them and seeming to get along with them, Vange decided to give the Irishman the benefit of the doubt. For now.

  Several hours later, Peadar helped Vange to her feet, said their goodbyes until the morning, and escorted her back to their own cabin.

  They were busy awhile, and then as they lay in each other’s arms with the boat rocking them to sleep, they got to talking.

  “So who was that Irish man?”

  “One of Shane O’Neil’s top men, come to inspect me, lass.”

  “Oh. Well, he seemed to approve of you.”

  “Aye, thus far.”

  “Thus far?”

  “Aye, on the morrow they’ll have a sword trial.”

  Vange clung to him tightly.

  “Could you die?”

  “Heh ha ha. Nay.”

  “Really?”

  “Aye … well ...”

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, I could always die, you ken?”

  “But probably not tomorrow?”

  “Aye, we will be using practice swords, lass.”

  “And those are ... what?”

  “Wooden swords with nay edges nor points.”

  “Yeah, there’s no point, alright.”

  Peadar rewarded her with a rich deep laugh that shook both of them in the bed every few minutes until they were both fast asleep.

  As she drifted off, Vange kept thinking yay. I finally cracked a joke that Peadar got.

  Vange woke up alone. For a brief moment, she had no idea where she was. When it hit her, the panic that she’d barely been keeping at bay set in full force.

  Where had Peadar gone?

  Was he fighting right now?

  Could she stop it?

  Was she too late?

  The more questions she asked herself, the more she shook with worry.

  An odd thing also happened, though. She got curious to know the answers.

  Vange grabbed her plaids from the night before off the shelf where they’d been shoved in a fit of passion, washed her face with part of her sleeve and the water from the washstand, fixed her breid hat the best she could in the reflection of the metal porthole
cover, pulled on her handmade boots made of purple and orange leather, used the chamber pot in the corner of the tiny cabin, and...

  She found the cabin door had been locked from the outside.

  “No no no no no. I am not some shrinking violet you men can lock away in a closet.” she screamed, not at all sure anyone could hear her.

  And then the metal porthole cover caught her eye.

  No, I’m small enough to crawl out through a porthole.

  Vange got up on the bed, opened the porthole cover, and was halfway through when she realized her skirts weren’t going to fit.

  “No problem at all, guys.” she called out to no one in particular. “I’d rather wear pants anyway.”

  Vange tore off first her outskirt and then her inner skirt and threw the fold-down bed back up so she could rummage through the trunk.

  “There has to be a pair of pants in here somewhere.”

  She tore through the contents, not even mildly impressed with all the finery she found neatly folded inside.

  “Aha. I knew there would be a pair of pants.”

  She shimmied into the one pair of pants she found.

  They would probably have been knee-length on Peadar. On her they were mid-calf. They probably would have fit Peadar’s waist exactly. On her they were so loose that she had to take all the pouches off her belt and use it to keep the pants from sagging down to her knees.

  These leine sleeves are a problem, too. They’re big enough to carry all the clothes from the trunk. Not the kind of thing a gymnast wears.

  Vange’s experience as a gymnast had been in the first, second, and third grades back home in the Phillippeans. Hardly professional level, but it did give her confidence. Perhaps too much.

  Heck with these sleeves. There are plenty more shirts in the trunk. I’ll just cut the sleeves right off this one.

  And that’s just what she did, only her dagger had been stolen by the little people, so she had to tear the sleeves off.

  Riiiiiiiiiiiip. Riiiiiiiiiiip.

  That had been fun.

  What else could she cut? What would make the men quit staring at her inappropriately?

  “Ug. And this hair is next.”

  Vange looked around for something to hack her hair off with, but not finding anything, she re-tied her breid scarf so that all her hair was trapped inside it.

  Only pausing briefly to look at her reflection for a change, Vange threw open the porthole cover and climbed out.

  The early morning sun was in Vange’s eyes, and the ship was heading straight into the waves, bouncing over each one, but that didn’t deter her.

  She was angry.

  They would lock her up in a cabin, would they?

  Men.

  They were all alike when you got right down to it: inconsiderate pigs.

  From her perch on the porthole, she could reach the lip of the ship’s deck. She turned so she was facing the side of the ship, grabbed the deck, and climbed up onto it.

  She was up top.

  From here, she could see that the ship was in the middle of the sea, with land visible in the distance in most directions, but a little closer in front. That must be Ireland.

  She also saw several of the ship’s crew members messing with the ropes attached to the sails. Yep, most of them were Polynesian, like her. And they all wore mid-calf trousers much like the ones she had on.

  She also saw Peadar fighting with the Irishman, all over the deck. Sure enough, they were both using wooden swords. Making quite a lot of noise with them, too...

  But.

  Oh.

  Wow.

  Their fight was good.

  Way better than watching a martial arts movie.

  Vange hadn’t really paid much attention to the sword demonstrations at the renaissance faire. Those had seemed … fake and irrelevant to her. But this?

  This was art. Poetry in motion. OK, that was trite, but wow, it was true.

  Peadar and the Irishman moved so fast she could barely keep up, but every time one of them attacked, the other counter-attacked, and this happened in such fluid motion that it looked like a choreographed dance.

  Vange didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there on the deck gawping at the sword fight when she heard a male voice five or so years younger than hers speaking next to her in the 1560 version of some Polynesian language.

  “You’d better get to work before they see you slacking.”

  “I don’t know how to do any of the work,” Vange answered in Tagalog.

  “I can show you.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “I’m Toj.”

  “Hi. I’m Mika.”

  She wasn’t lying, per se. Mika was the nickname all her relatives had used for her when she was little.

  Vange was still watching the sword fight out of the corner of her eye. She was reassured that it was indeed just a test and not to the death, because every once in a while the two men would stop to mop the sweat off their brows and drink lots of ale, which Vange hoped had a weak alcohol content.

  Meanwhile, Toj showed Vange how to trim the sails—and he talked her ear off.

  “Don’t you hate this Irish food? Oatmeal, bleck.”

  “Last night’s dinner was good.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “I like to joke, but no, I’m not right now.”

  “That soup was so thin the sea water would have been more filling.”

  Oh. The crew didn’t eat the same food as the captain and his fine guests. She’d had no idea. Best to change the subject.

  “How long have you been on this ship?”

  “We just took on in London, me and my dad and my brothers.”

  “London? I thought this ship was going to Ireland?”

  “It is, but many ships go back and forth from London to there.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting.”

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. I thought Ireland had more in common with Scotland.”

  “Well, yeah, but England is taking over Ireland.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. They already have a large piece of it that they call The Pale.”

  “Is that where this ship is headed?”

  “Oh no. The Scots always land around the backside of Ireland, beyond The Pale, where their Irish brothers seek their aid in keeping the English at bay. That’s why they’ve recruited this one.”

  Toj nodded toward Peadar.

  “So he’ll be fighting the English?”

  “Yep.”

  “Have you seen much sword fighting?”

  “Yeah, almost all of them practice on the deck like this. Why?”

  “Does this one look up to the task?”

  Toj watched Peadar for a few minutes while he and Vange worked.

  “Hm. This one is odd. He doesn’t fight the same way as the rest of them.”

  “In a bad way?”

  “No no, in a good way.”

  Vange and Toj both watched while Peadar kept the Irish man running after him, never quite letting him get a hit in. Every once in a while though, Peadar would stop unexpectedly. The Irish man would all but run into his practice sword. If it had been a real sword...

  The kilted man and the skirted man came near Vange and Toj then.

  And Peadar looked up.

  Her husband’s eyes got huge when he saw her.

  Huge with terror.

  “I’ve got to go,” Vange told Toj.

  “Where could you need to go? We all need to share the work.”

  But as soon as she’d seen Peadar’s reaction to her outfit, Vange had understood what Peadar was so horrified about. She was supposed to be a lady, and look at her. She could not let the captain see her like this—and nor could she allow the captain to open their cabin door and find her missing.

  “Maybe I’ll see you again, Toj, but probably not.”

  She was running for the edge of the ship where he
r porthole was.

  It probably looked like she meant to dive into the sea.

  Poor Toj.

  “Wait.”

  Before he could get to her, Vange slipped over the side and in through the porthole, then slammed it shut and secured it with its bar.

  Before anyone else saw her in the Mika get-up, she had all those clothes off and was frantically putting on first an intact leine shirt and then an underskirt and overdress.

  She was lacing her boots when she heard a key in the lock and glanced up at her reflection in the porthole cover.

  Her hair was still entirely tucked up into her breid scarf, but from what she’d heard at the faire workshops, that was more proper, rather than less.

  Peadar’s worried voice came through the cabin wall.

  And then the captain’s assertive one.

  “Come on in.” Vange called out. “I’m dressed.”

  “See?” the captain said in that old-fashioned English they spoke, “your wife is much more accommodating than you were led to believe. I daresay if she had a kitchen, she might even serve us tea.”

  Vange gritted her teeth. Yeah, she might, but she would probably spit in the captain’s when he wasn’t looking, male chauvinist pig that he was.

  And then the door was open and the two kilted men were looking her over—the captain as if she were meat for sale in the market, and Peadar as if he would find her looking like what she was: a Polynesian woman, rather than some Scottish lady.

  But now Peadar wasn’t her only friend in this backward world. She could go join the other Polynesians. She could …

  But who was she kidding?

  Emily’s email had been clear: the only known way for Vange to get home to her own time period was to get back to the Scottish highlands somehow and find a druid who would send her home. From conversations she’d had with Emily, Vange knew that the “They” in Emily’s email were the druids.

  No, Peadar wasn’t her only friend, but he was her best bet at getting home.

  She smiled at her husband and then addressed the captain.

  “Tea would be nice, but breakfast sounds even better.”